February 16, 2021 Arts & Culture Searching for Gwendolyn Brooks By Bernard Ferguson Gwendolyn Brooks at her typewriter. Often, when I look back at the poems that have found their sudden ways to me—the ones that have chosen me in particular, to move through me and onto the page—it is hard to imagine they are related to one another. It is hard to believe the poems that sprawl wide, the poems that play their tricks, the poems that exhume and resurrect, that breathe strange and speak with different tongues, all share a common denominator. It is hard to believe all the differently hued poems I’ve written have come from my own throat, born of the same place but perhaps of a different season, fruit of the same tree perched on a different branch. How is one of my poems that sounds like “How Great,” by Chance the Rapper—a song that I love—related to another poem that I would not have written without reading Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches? How is a poem I wrote about my late father’s gold chain related to a poem I only fairly recently discovered? This is the natural order of being descended from one common lineage, so much of the work I love the poetic offshoot of one common ancestor. Those that have taught me my best lessons have all learned from Gwendolyn Brooks, or have learned from someone who had learned from Brooks. Today, if I squint hard enough, if I ask the right questions, it seems everything—the poems, the music, the seasons—points me back to her. * My poetic lineage is constructed, as I see it, via the long list of all the poems, visions, music, stories, and every syllable of any bit of good language that I’ve encountered in my life. What becomes cardinal in that lineage is the bits that manage to sear my inner skull with their light and bring me new ways of seeing. One entry point into my lineage can be found in the poetry of Ross Gay, and more specifically, his poem, “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” and, even more specific still, his line, “My color’s green. I’m Spring.” I was first assigned Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude while in an undergrad workshop, and I consumed it so quickly I made small gusts of wind as I turned the pages. Gay’s ability to wield the hues of joy made me hunger. His poems taught me how I myself might enter language through the wide threshold of rapture. Gay is known to enter delight through many different doors, but in “Sorrow Is Not My Name,” Gay decided the door would be death itself. Death and the many tools it has sharpened and dipped into fire. Death and its claws tapping through the frost on our bedroom windows. I have been in close proximity to the reaper and his wide blade, and so it feels familiar to watch Gay’s speaker name death as it appears throughout the landscape: just this morning a vulture nodded his red, grizzled head at me He names it again as he finds death even closer: the skeleton in the mirror, the man behind me on the bus taking notes And yet, there is delight. There is a sense that Gay’s speaker will surely perish eventually, maybe even soon, but certainly not today, not in this particular poem. Today, Gay’s speaker feels only delight rupturing through his body. …yeah, yeah. But look; my niece is running through a field calling my name. The speaker remembers, almost like a prayer, that their name is not endued with sorrow. And thus, the poem ends with a line that has clogged the cogs of my thinking; clogged them with glee: I remember. My color’s green. I’m spring. Read More
February 16, 2021 First Person The Garden By Hilton Als Ernest Lawson, Garden Landscape, ca. 1915, oil on canvas, 20 x 24″. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Ma thought it was a good idea. That we work together in the garden. But it wasn’t a garden then, just a long rectangle of funky-smelling earth behind a two-story apartment house in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. An elderly couple named Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz owned the house and backyard. This was in the early seventies, and already the Jews were moving out. I was ten or twelve the summer we worked in the earth. The Schwartzes lived downstairs from us in that house, and on Fridays their apartment went semidark because of the Sabbath. What a beautiful word for something I didn’t know anything about. Then, one day, I saw the tattooed numbers on Mrs. Schwartz’s arm and in a flash everything I’d learned in school flooded my mind and heart: all those bodies laid to waste, gold teeth extracted and made into something else, the gas chambers and the musicians who played as the walking dead stood naked, hoping for water, hoping to be cleaned. And there was more. There is always more pain and beauty. Recently, a friend told me about the gardens Jews kept for Nazi families who wanted something beautiful to look at while they smelled death at work, had schnapps and what all outside, the condemned Jews not lifting their heads as they worked the earth and tended flowers, such beautiful living organisms thriving on a plantation where murder was grown and harvested. And I think of Mrs. Schwartz now as I think about the earth behind our house—her house—and the numbers blooming on her arm like flowers. I never got to ask her how old she was when she was marked like that, and did she remember or see barbed wire fencing the condemned in like the wiring around flower beds and vegetable beds our innocent neighbors used to keep predators out? Nor did I get to say to her, even as those numbers on her arm blossom and die in my memory, What is it about flowers that no matter where they’re grown—in death camps or by the sea, in private homes or on the border of war zones—why is it they keep on flowering while insisting on their right to inspire feelings in us that we can barely know, or articulate in all our truth and terribleness? When I think about the Schwartzes, I think about their building, our home, and I think about the steep staircase leading up from the street to our apartment, and the long shape of our apartment itself, and the fact that we lived next door to a gas station where fumes bloomed. This is the only apartment I have vivid memories of—we moved a fair amount when I was a kid—and part of what I remember about it is the garden or, more accurately, how the garden came to be. Read More
February 12, 2021 This Week’s Reading Staff Picks: Bathing Suits, Bright Winters, and Broken Hearts By The Paris Review Still from Black Bear. Courtesy of Tandem Pictures. Lawrence Michael Levine’s fourth feature, Black Bear, really messed with my equilibrium. I first saw the film as part of Nightstream, a collaborative virtual horror film festival, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that it stirred up something deep in my psyche. The plot unfolds in three distinct strands. One follows a filmmaker and former actress named Allison (Aubrey Plaza) who heads to a wooded retreat to seek inspiration for her next film while navigating the awkward tension of the cabin’s caretakers, Gabe (Christopher Abbott) and Blair (Sarah Gadon). The second departs from almost everything established by the first, picking up on the final day of shooting for a film directed by Gabe and costarring Blair, whose apparent chemistry with Gabe informs Allison’s starring performance at the cost of her sanity. The third strand involves Allison meditating by the lake in a red bathing suit. Feeling disoriented yet? Fear not. Black Bear delivers plenty of laughs from a stellar supporting cast and a career-best performance by Plaza. This cabin-in-the-woods head trip is well worth the spins. —Christopher Notarnicola Read More
February 12, 2021 Look People-Shaped White Rocks By Chris Ware Jean-Antoine Houdon, Madame His, 1775, marble, 31 1/2″ tall. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Victor Thaw, 2007. There are few uncooler-sounding words than “eighteenth-century marble portraiture.” Even typing these words makes me feel like I’m prepping for the PSAT. But eighteenth-century marble portraiture—specifically that of Jean-Antoine Houdon, known for his uncool likenesses of Voltaire and George Washington—can be extraordinarily strange. Furthermore, the examples here are nearly nowhere to be found on your phone except in lo-res preview form. In other words, you have to actually go to the Frick to see them. Two busts, sculpted within two years of each other, are paired in an out-of-the way hall of the museum: a woman, Madame His, and a man, Armand-Thomas Hue. Translucent, actual-sized, people-shaped white rocks carved in Enlightenment dress and balanced atop quadrangular pedestals at eyeball height, both are lopped off somewhere above the waist and function as the sort of thing that museum-going twenty-first-century humans are likely to walk right past and think, “Oh, art.” Which is just what I did, on my way to the Bellini painting I’d planned to write about. But something stopped me. Madame His doesn’t look like the majority of eighteenth-century painted portraits I’d seen, which largely crash-land somewhere in flyover caricature country: big watery eyes, boiled-egg chins, tiny red lips. As I circled the bust, I increasingly admired how it substantiated my mental template of “actual human being,” how Houdon had worked outside his epoch’s stylizations. I was surprised by how the marble skin seemed to suggest hidden muscles and tendons, by how the slightly rougher fabric of the bodice lightly met her soft shoulders. Then I looked up, and something even more surprising happened: Madame His met my gaze. Read More
February 11, 2021 Look And the Clock Waits So Patiently By Rebecca Bengal The following essay appears in But Still, It Turns, edited by Paul Graham and published by MACK earlier this month. The book accompanies an exhibition of the same name showing at International Center of Photography (ICP) until May 9. Gregory Halpern. Image from ZZYZX (MACK, 2016), in But Still, It Turns, edited by Paul Graham (MACK, 2021). Courtesy of the artist and MACK. Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. —Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography I don’t know whose side you’re on, But I am here for the people Who work in grocery stores that glow in the morning And close down for deep cleaning at night. —Jericho Brown, “Say Thank You Say I’m Sorry” I Now, wherever and whenever that is for you Dark stars inked on the palm of a raised hand. A tiny blackbird alone in the gaping, giant world of a street curb. Someone crouching in asphalt-baked sun in a position of prayer or pain or ecstasy, or perhaps all of the above. A guy kneeling to cut open a watermelon as two mothers perch on the edge of a gas station parking lot, their children swarming close. The craggy shadow in the desert cast by a rock face; the man in a poncho crossing a thin creek over tall, shadowy grasses. The herculean act of pushing a massive tree down the middle of a rural Alabama street. A young boy fitting his small body in the space between tire rim and hub of a car, draped around the curve of the wheel. The frozen, shouting faces of a lineup of white cheerleaders some sixty years ago and, in an image from perhaps the same year, a white mother teaching her little girl to shoot a gun. A deer running down a highway embankment, between roads. We know that a photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the various eras of its subsequent rediscovery. Lazy language has us reaching for the trope of “capturing” “a moment.” Similarly it is ingrained in us to look at photographs as stilled time, as past. But even this is a relative condition. The perception of the past is split in the act of remembering: how a moment first appeared, how it is seen differently later and reseen again, taken out of isolation, reshaped by knowledge and context. How the singular is part of a larger sequence. When the experience of the present is overwhelmingly and radically altered, the grammar of time is disrupted, too. Verbs no longer conjugate cleanly into their compartmentalized dimensions of past, present, and future; actions and thoughts loop back on one another. Linearity disappears. An analog clock, repetitive and circular, winding and ticking, is more relevant than the calendar. Strike twelve once again. Sometimes we inhabit all the tenses and eras at once. As I lived with the images in But Still, It Turns over many months, as they became markedly more immediate, speaking with startling prescience to unfolding events that they preceded by years, that they had perhaps on some level intuited, I began to understand their shared subject as the nature of time itself: how we perceive it, how we exist in it, how it exists in us, how it connects us. Read More
February 11, 2021 Arts & Culture Stopping the Void By Ottilie Mulzet Ottilie Mulzet on how her adoptive heritage lead her to a life of and in translation. Learning a language is a kind of practice, as anyone who’s ever learned one will tell you. It has its own drills, milestones, peaks, and valleys. Its own rituals, such as repeating phrases aloud three times so they will register in your ears, the choreography embedded into the interface of tongue and palate. The reverberations echo in your skull—even if forgotten five minutes later, a residue remains. One ploughs through printed dictionaries and delights in their idiosyncrasies, which are missing from the online versions. There are “found poems” in certain dictionary entries. There’s pleasure in the way the language lives on your tongue, in your throat, each language residing there differently. As someone who, as an adoptee, had to perform identity, I am continually fascinated by the ways identity shifts within, and in between, languages. * Growing up, I felt bereft of narrative. English was the language I spoke; Canada’s bilingual policy meant I had cursory French lessons in school, and I heard smatterings of Yiddish from older adoptive relatives (I always wanted to hear more). The notions of “motherland” and “mother tongue” are not anything I relate to. If anything, it was the English words I read that suckled me—but these words weren’t my mother. There were two mothers, one flesh-and-blood and present, the other absent, a vague image. One was Catholic, the other Jewish; one pregnant out of wedlock, the other married. The enforced secrecy of my birth mother’s identity enshrouded her in a taboo from which I recoiled, as from some amorphous void. That void had made me, but it could also swallow me up. I had been “rescued” from it, and what could be more ungrateful or unwise than to go rushing back to the disaster from which you’d just been rescued? When adoptees choose to search, it is so that their shadowy parents might be granted real-life outlines. If this never happens, the parents remain amorphous, taking up undue space in one’s mind, eternal shape-shifters. Read More